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BURMA: Junta Holds Referendum in Cyclone Aftermath

Moe Yu May

PATHEIN, May 10 2008 (IPS) - Shortly after sunrise on Saturday, a few men and women in this town on the banks of a river broke their morning routines to cast ballots – an act unusual in the military-ruled country.

The men, mostly middle-aged, had come to the polling station after finishing their dawn exercises. The women had arrived on their way to the open market, carrying empty baskets. Others who trickled in during the rest of the day came in small groups of three or four. The voting was far from brisk.

But this vote on May 10 was not to elect a new government in military-ruled Burma, or Myanmar. It was a ballot for a referendum to approve a new constitution that the junta was forcing on a beleaguered people. The last time the people had voted was for the parliamentary elections in 1990 when the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) claimed a landslide victory – only to see it rudely brushed aside by the military.

‘’Through this vote we have to show our decision who we want,’’ said a 40-year-old voter who owned a shop in this town, west of the former capital Rangoon. ‘’We are ordinary citizens, not those with authority. I only want to work with freedom.’’

Such talk of freedom in a country that has been under military rule since a 1962 coup was not the only concern on the mind of this voter, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He, like many others in Pathein, was troubled by something more tragic: the powerful cyclone that swept through the Irrawaddy delta a short distance to the south a week ago, leaving between 66,000 to 100,000 people dead or missing, according to official and diplomatic estimates.

‘’When I think of the victims, I feel angry, because of the irresponsible way the government has responded to the cyclone,’’ he told IPS after casting his ballot in a state high school.

He does not have to go far to learn about such victims of Cyclone Nargis, which made landfall on May 3 with wind speeds of up to 190 km per hour, pushing up a wall of sea water that rose four meters high and crashed on the flat, river-fed regions of the delta.

This town has been steadily filling up with men, women and children who survived the ravages of the cyclone and made long journeys with little state support to find shelter and relief.

Then there is the story at general hospital in this town, where close to 180 of its 400 beds are occupied by cyclone victims, most of whom had been admitted two days after Burma’s worst natural disaster in living memory struck. Some were fortunate, getting a place in the few helicopters the junta had assigned to help the victims. Others had to be carried to where they can take a three-hour boat ride to relative safety.

‘’There were many people injured in our village,’’ says Myint Oo, a fisherman from Labutta, one of the worst hit townships in the delta. ‘’I was taken two days later in a military helicopter.’’

Yet the pain from his injured back is not all that troubles the 48-year-old. He is uncertain about 30 members of his extended family in a part of the township where some 4,000 people lived. ‘’After the storm I only saw about 100 or 150 people, but nobody from my family,’’ he revealed.

What saved him was a palm tree. He had held on to it as the furious waters from the cyclone surged around him.

It was out of concern for survivors like Myint Oo and for the thousands who died in the seven townships in the Irrawaddy delta and in the 40 townships in Rangoon that an international appeal was made to the junta to postpone the referendum. Even U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon added his voice to the call.

The junta refused to budge. It stuck to its original plan to conduct the referendum on the chosen date after announcing that the people in the affected areas will be able to vote on a new date, May 24.

Such a move confirmed a view gaining ground among angry Burmese within the country that the junta is more interested in enforcing the approval of the country’s third constitution at the expense of helping the victims of Cyclone Nargis.

A source with close connections to highly-placed officials within the regime revealed to IPS that such a view is grounded in reality. The country’s strong man, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, had taken a decision ‘’not to use many troops and financial resources to help the people, since he wanted to use many of them for the referendum,’’ he said.

In fact, the junta’s refusal to postpone the referendum, in the wake of last week’s unprecedented natural disaster, strengthens the case that the military leaders are desperate to secure a ‘victory’ and gain political legitimacy.

Observers say that the elections will do little to restore civilian rule since the proposed constitution guarantees 25 percent of parliamentary seats to the military. It would also bar NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi from holding public office.

Although the regime refused to accept international aid, for days after Cyclone Nargis struck, state-run television has been showing images of top generals, including Than Shwe, distributing boxes of aid material, the markings on them changed suitably, to cyclone victims.

‘’The main reason the regime stuck to its original plans was to gain legitimacy and the people’s support for its government,’’ Win Min, a Burmese national security expert lecturing at Payap University, in northern Thailand, told IPS correspondent in Bangkok Marwaan Macan-Markar over the phone.

‘’They also showed what they consider more important, their priorities,’’ he added. ‘’The regime is more interested in holding on to power than in caring about the people’s suffering,’’ Win Min said.

Evidence of that was amply displayed on the referendum day across many part of the country, according to sources inside and outside Burma that IPS spoke with. In the Arakan State, in western Burma, local authorities had gone from house to house pressurising people to vote ‘yes’, while in a town in south-eastern Burma ballot boxes were stuffed with ‘yes’ votes before polls closed.

Attempts by the NLD to observe voting close to Rangoon were thwarted, too. A car that NLD members were travelling in to visit polling stations was stopped. Other NLD members have reported that authorities in some provincial towns had ‘’forced’’ voters to vote ‘yes’ after confiscating their registration or identity cards.

‘’It was not a free poll,’’ a visibly angry 63-year-old woman said after leaving her polling station. ‘’An official in the polling station came to where I was to write my vote and forced me to vote ‘yes’.’’